The following extract from my new book Circles: Nurture and Grow your Creative Gift is about that action of releasing what we have made into the world and the feeling of vulnerability that comes with that. Also the fact that our works are not extensions of us, but they are their own thing somehow, set apart from us. They exist because we listened long enough to bring them into existence. There is a wonderful Nabokov quote: ‘the pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamouring to become visible.’ Imagine the scores of untold plays, poems and stories dancing above the earth like the Aurora Borealis. Let’s be listeners, willing and waiting to pull them down to earth…
‘And after the struggle, there is a relief, mixed with fear when we break through. Imagine pushing with all your might against a wall, and then one day, it gives way. Suddenly you are terrified. You used all your strength against that wall, that was just the way it was, then all of a sudden, there was space, there was the next step.
When I have finished a work there are several steps that I go through. A sigh of relief (‘I’ve done it! I can’t believe I got to the end!’), a wave of terror (‘Maybe it’s not quite finished, maybe it’s not good enough..’), a sense of exhaustion (‘It felt like a marathon and now I need to recover’), a sense of dread (‘What next?’). These are the stages that we work through. We might leave our work to rest for a while, we might seek feedback from others, we might launch it and see what the world thinks.
I have spent a good many years (about ten!) working on a novel, off and on. Last year, after writing, redrafting, getting a mentor, reworking, redrafting, polishing, I began to send out the first three chapters to agents. It felt a curious thing. I had finished at last. I could breathe a sigh of relief. I was proud of what I had achieved. But I also found myself stepping back from it. It was its own thing, launched into the inboxes of strangers.
It felt a bit like labour; there was the exhaustion and the elation but then there was this thing that you had created. You finally got to meet your child for the first time and it was kind of surprising. There was a new being, entirely apart from you. When my first son was born, and as he grew, I naively thought we would be able to pin each part of him down; ‘You get that from your father, that from me,’ ‘We thought you’d be like this.’ But he was utterly different, utterly surprising. I guess that’s how I feel about the novel, it is a thing that I gave birth to, but it is a thing set apart from me.
On some of the agent’s submission pages, I had to explain why I wrote the novel, how it filled a gap in the market, and what I could compare it to, but I was a little stumped at these questions. I didn’t write to fill a gap, or because I was knowledgeable about a certain thing; I wrote it because it came up out of me.
There is always a mixture of things that go into a novel; a culmination of interests, of curiosity from my childhood, strange tales from my father, an attempt to make sense of those things that don’t make sense, especially in the mind of a child, but I think we are drawn to certain things subconsciously and only the unfolding of time will tell us why. Or maybe we will never know why. I remember a piece of writing that I was really pleased with at secondary school. It was a description of my Grandmother’s garden, the tumbledown sheds, the willow that you could hide yourself in and it stayed with me, the mystery of that place. It seemed like something I could write about. There are layers and layers of memories in that garden; tasting juicy apples straight from the tree, learning to roll the old rusty barrel under my feet, my uncle pulling an armchair out onto the lawn in the blazing sun. And these layers have settled down over time to create a rich source of material, of feeling and memory, of detail which comes back when I start to dig.
And there are other influences too; who I am now, and also the mystery of creativity, the life force of the work itself which tugs and pulls your story in ways that you were not expecting. And when this starts to happen, when my own writing surprises me, if feels as if I am finally getting somewhere.
For letting go in creativity happens all the time in creativity, not just at the end when we finally show it to others, but all the way through, if we let it…’
Circles: Nurture and Grow Your Creative Gift (ISBN 978-1-78815-733-9) will be released on April 1st 2019 and is published by Onwards and Upwards. It will be available from onwardsandupwards.org, Amazon and all good bookshops.
You can also find it in my Etsy shop: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/681250504/circles-nurture-and-grow-your-creative?ref=shop_home_recs_5&pro=1&frs=1
elisabeth pike 